The Schoenblog

My students are pretty good at answering questions, but they aren’t always great at asking them. Questioning is a hard skill, involving critical thinking, creativity, and inquiry. Simply put, we don’t do enough to teach students how to ask good questions. At least I don’t.

After watching groups of students awkwardly flail in silence in lieu of meaningful Socratic discussion and questioning, I realized this dilemma: how can we expect student to ask high level questions to promote critical thinking and discussion when school prepares them for the opposite? Too often, our system prepares students to answer more than ask and to consume instead of create.

I started this week with a challenge to myself: I needed to do more to help my students practice close reading and make progress in argumentative writing. A few months ago, my students were producing interesting and often insightful paragraphs, essays, and projects--and most were well written. I was happy with the growth and journey.

Now, in the slump of spring beginnings and after the dark days of winter, it’s time to tighten up. My kids are great and are more than capable, but I needed them to review the fundamentals and practice the writing and analysis skills, which were getting a little lax of late.

I was looking for resources to help my students achieve two main goals:

How do we get students to read more? It’s one of the those questions that just never seems to be answered well enough for an English teacher. And things get more complicated when we add in the next questions: how do we get them them like it?

Over the past few years I’ve tackled the “independent reading” in a variety of ways. Most often, though, I found that when students are given the freedom to pick their reading selections and have guidance to help them find a book they might enjoy, the chances for success increased. It seemed so obvious--let students read what they want to and help them find things that connect with their interests.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about book matching--can we take a student’s interests and passions in genres of movies, TV, music, etc. and use them to find the gateway book to foster an appreciation (dare I say love of?) literature? With that in mind, I’ve kept my Book Review projects simple in their requirements:

1. Choose a book you want to read.
2. Read it. Enjoy it. If not, consider switching to something you will enjoy. 
3. Then, create a project that reviews the book with a summary and evaluation.

Find the full Project Assignment here but that’s the gist of it. I wanted my students to enjoy reading, but then I asked them to respond to their books by creating a review. This has been an opportunity for me to push my students to create and explore new technology to display their learning and understanding. I offered the option of a written review, but encouraged students to explore videos, podcasts, and other presentation tools.

I’ve written about these ideas and versions of this project in the past, sharing students’ work last April in Students Must Create: Rethinking My Book Review Projects and in a guest post last June on FreeTech4Teachers, Transforming Learning Through Student Content Creation. Today’s post is a direct follow up to the project, skills, and products. I’ll share some student work and reflect on changes for next time.

Sharing with the World

Throughout the year, I ask students to submit work in a variety of ways. Work that is turned in to the teacher is submitted on Classroom for Feedback. If the intended audience is our class community, then it also is shared on our Google Community. For work that I want to share out in an organized fashion, like these projects or Genius Hour blogs, I also asks students to turn in links on a Google Form so I can easily organize and share them. Finally, I often ask students to Tweet their work and share it with the world.

Find a public view of the Database Form that students turned in this assignment on at the link. The form asks students to rate the book, its difficulty, and a few related questions to produce the OHS Book Review Database. This database was created with Awesome Table so that students can search for reviews from past classes to find the books that might interest them. All of my students’ work from the past two years can be found on the database.

The Project Watched Around the World

Within a day of turning in her work, a student named Emma send me the following e-mail and screen shot:

Hi Mr Schoenbart! Check it out! People in Canada, Sweden, and Uzbekistan (wherever that is) are watching my book review video!


I wrote back today and asked her for an update so I could add to this post. She wrote:
Hi Mr. Schoenbart! The video now has 91 views and has been watched by people in America, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Switzerland! The power of the internet! ~Emma

I also explained to Emma, and to many students, that some of the views could be automated bots, refreshes etc., but even so her 91 views were exciting. She wrote, “The power of the internet!” and I hope that by sharing our products and our awesome, my students can learn about the power of connecting and collaborating meaningfully and responsibly.

In this project, students are reading, summarizing, evaluating, creating, sharing for authentic audiences, and more. We are essentially developing true 21st century skills through the book report, a staple of the English class. But these projects will live on forever, databased for my future students and online for an audience bigger than our classroom or school.

Sharing Student Work

Below, find a few of the products from this year’s students. For more, explore the OHS Book Review Database.

Here's Emma's video review of To Build a Castle:

Like many teachers this time of year, I’m struggling to prepare my students for their midterm. I want to them to practice and get meaningful feedback to prepare them to do better, but it’s a challenge to keep up with the workload. As an English teacher, meaningful feedback often means A LOT of reading and writing. One of my goals is always to do more with less and to let technology do the work for me when it can. This time, though, I used an easy and no-tech strategy to provide specific formative feedback to help my students improve.

Color Coded

Instead of providing words, sentences, and even paragraphs of feedback, I simply color coded my responses. With a few colored lines or dots, I told students everything they needed to know. Each color represented a piece of specific feedback with the first color on a page conveying the rubric score of the task and the rest communicating why. The colors were assigned at random and helped me give the feedback my students needed in seconds. See my notes below for my first draft:



I came up with this procedure on the fly, as my messy notes show. My goal was to respond to the work quickly so that every student left with 2-3 ideas towards revision and improvement. Students then discussed their work in groups or with me before moving forward to help add meaning.

Critical Thinking

I love comic books. I’ve read them and studied them all my life. I read, collect, and share my passion every chance I get. When I can bring this love into my classroom is when I really get excited. That’s why one of my favorite units for English 10 is teaching Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night with Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic novel, Maus II. These two powerful texts work together beautifully to help students understand history, about responsibility, and to examine the style and craft of two wonderful creators.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird seven years ago. For one reason or another, I never read it in high school; it wasn't until my first teaching position that I had the pleasure. In the time since, I taught the novel 2-4 times a year for five years to my tenth graders. In the past seven years, I've read Mockingbird well over a dozen times. The text moved down to the middle school, and that will make me forever sorry since it was my favorite book to teach. Needless to say, I have a close relationship with the story of Scout, Atticus, and Tom Robinson. I admired the tenacity of the young Jean Louise, Jem's struggle to become a young adult, and Atticus as a paragon of all that's right in the world. In fact, Atticus was my literary god. I used to tell students that when in doubt, Atticus had the answer. Critical Lens essay? Use Atticus' characterization and conflict. SAT essay? Atticus' closing argument will make great evidence for any topic. Have to make a tough decision? WWAD? What would Atticus do?

Meme via Pinterest. I wish I had this on a t-shirt.

"Atticus, you are rewriting history."

For better or worse, what absolutely fascinates me about Watchman are the differences in character and plot. The most important and obvious: Atticus won the trial of Tom Robinson. It's almost glossed over and not discussed nearly enough for me, but Tom Robinson was found innocent in the world of Watchman. I so desperately want to know what happened next. This world of Maycomb that almost was and now is will compel me to read and reread for years to come. Of course, we have the former KKK-member Atticus to content with, too, but oddly enough, this is less of an issue for me. Here's why:

To Kill a Mockingbird is Scout's story, and is appropriately written from the perspective of a young girl who has a blind faith in her father, the only true role model she has. In Watchman, Lee writes, "She looked at Maycomb, and her throat tightened: Maycomb was looking back at her. Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets."

The Atticus of Mockingbird is a moral paragon because his young daughter thinks it to be so. Whether or not she is correct is a much more complex question, but the simple fact that the entire story is seem through Scout's eyes adds such moral complexity to it's retelling in the not-so-sequel. Has Atticus changed? Or did we only ever know the Atticus who Scout knew? This article from Jezebel's title contends, "Atticus Was Always a Racist: Why Go Set a Watchman Is No Surprise." While I don't agree with everything, it's an interesting take. Who is Atticus Finch? The conflicted, complex, and maybe realistic old man or the dedicated, moral, and just lawyer and father?




In Watchman, Atticus tells his daughter, "Jean Louise, I'm only trying to tell you some plain truths. You must see things as they are, as well as they should be." What is the plain truth here?

The truth, for me, is that the corruption of Atticus isn't as important to me as the growth of Scout. After all these years, it's now Scout's turn and her real coming of age. Even with her 26-years of wisdom and despite living in the big city of New York, it's coming home that leads to her loss of innocence and reckoning with her father. The trial of Tom Robinson from her childhood no longer has that power since now Atticus won, changing the world of Maycomb we knew. No longer is this story about the coming of age of the precocious young girl but her struggles to reconcile the ideal of Atticus we used to share with the the morally complex old man that only a more adult Scout can begin to understand.

Despite the contradictions, confusion, and complexities, I enjoyed Watchman for the most part. I was fascinated by it the whole way through. The adult Jean Louise was a well-realized evolution of the tomboy we know and love, and to see her true coming of age was heartbreaking and nostalgia-ridden. The ideas and even dialogue that called back to Mockingbird both warmed and broke my heart. When Uncle Jack asks her, "What kind of people were we, Jean Louise? What kind of people are we?" and she replies, "I thought we were just people," I wanted to stand up and cheer. While I missed Jem and was desperate to learn the fate of Boo Radley, to read Aunt Alexandra try to again tell Scout about the facts of life and the reality of being a Finch was great. Even better was the realization: "No--I'm quite sure you know those facts already."





These characters live in the world of To Kill a Mockingbird that could have been, and maybe almost was. They are the characters as real to me as my friends and colleagues and have aged and grown with heart and wisdom. The evolution--or devolution--of Atticus Finch, too, certainly raises questions and controversy, but adds a complexity that the now adult Scout's journey requires to ring true. In Mockingbird, she came of age in her understanding of race, gender, and identity to the best of her childhood ability. Her father, though, was the admirable but unrealistic static hope of Maycomb. And while I'm not quite sure I like it, the characters are suddenly more real and flawed, living in a world of grey rather than that of black and white from Maycomb long ago.

I was talking to someone today who was interested in my job as an English Teacher. She immediately asked me what literature I make my students read. Two things quickly stood out:

• Do I make them read books?
• We read literature--but not as much as we used to...